Khaleeji Pidgin

Found on Chez Sinjab, this interesting blog post (Ma'alum, my friend?: The Grammarian's Guide to Khaleeji Pidgin) on the 'Indo-Anglo-Urdu-Arabic mix' spoken in the Gulf.

Of course, there are certain rules to Khaleeji pidgin.

First, certain words must be spoken in certain languages. Greetings, such as sala'am aleykum and sabah al kheir, are always in Arabic. How are you? is usually delievered in Arabic or Hindi. Iuwa, tamam, good, acha and, most importantly, ok are all acceptable ways of saying good. The phrase number one! must always be delivered in English, and with enthusiasm. My friend is perhaps the most popular English phrase, and is to be used liberally. No problem and mafi mushkala are both universally understood, but mafi mukh (no brain) must be spoken in Arabic. Throw in the occasional bas and khalas when ordering food or to show frustration. Then finished it all off with a masala'am for strangers or a yella, bye! for friends.

Another blogger describes the difficulties involved in mastering this mix:

..learning a 'standard' business English version and getting used to a few accents must be easier than learning the local Arabic mix here, which seems like the equivalent of having to master Biblical English, Shakespearian English, Indian English, Brummie, Geordie and a few others.

Lumberdar

शब्‍दों का सफ़र is Ajit Wadnerkar's excellent blog on Hindi word origins. Here's Ajit on the hybrid word lumberdar, formed from the English word ‘number’ with the Persian termination -dar. (For more on the word, see Hobson-Jobson ).

उत्तरभारत में इसे नंबरदार और लंबरदार दोनों तरीके से बोला जाता है। दरअसल इस नाम के पीछे अगर देखें तो प्राचीन भारत की संयुक्त परिवार प्रथा नज़र आती है। निकट संबंधियों के भरे पूरे परिवार की समृद्ध और समझदारी भरी परंपरा अंग्रेजों के शासन संभालने तक सांसे ले रही थी। यह परंपरा सामाजिक सुरक्षा के लिहाज से चाहे बढ़िया थी मगर कुटुम्ब की संयुक्त अधिकार वाली संपत्तियों , ज़मीनों आदि का हिसाब किताब बड़ा
पेचीदा काम था। खासतौर पर सरकार को जब लगान चुकाने की बात सामने आती थी तब इसकी मुश्किलें नज़र आती थीं। मगर सरकार को तो लगान वसूलना ही होता था सो एक व्यस्था बनाई गई जिसके मुताबिक संयुक्त परिवार के एक व्यक्ति विशेष को इस काम के लिए मुकर्रर कर दिया जाता था कि वह सरकारी शुल्क, लगान या अन्य दस्तावेजी कामों के लिए उत्तरदायी होगा। इस पूरी कार्रवाई का नंबर देखर रजिस्ट्रेशन होता था यानी वह व्यक्ति नंबर के ज़रिये रजिस्टर्ड होता इसलिए उसे नंबरदार कहा जाने लगा। वहीं व्यक्ति बाद में समूचे गांव से राजस्व वसूली के लिए भी प्रतिनिधि बनाया जाने लगा।

Entry From Backside

Entry from Backside Only: Hazaar Fundas of Indian-English is the title of a new book on Indian English by Binoo K. John.

Backsides have a frontal position in Indian-English. In cluttered, crowded alleys there can be seen the notice “Entry from backside”, a usage not exactly meant as a come-hither line to gays.

Haflong Hindi

The Indian Express reports on the pidgin Hindi that unites tribes living in the North Cachar Hills of Assam. ('In this Assam district, Hindi unites 11 tribes', Indian Express, 10 September, 2007).

“We call it Haflong Hindi,” said former Chairman of Haflong Town Committee Gopinath Gorlosa.

“A century ago, most of the 11 tribes living in the North Cachar Hills could hardly communicate with each other. Today, all of us have a common language, which we call Haflong Hindi,” Gorlosa said. While Gorlosa himself is a Dimasa, all other tribes—Hmar, Kuki, Zeme Naga, Biate, Vaiphei, Hrangkhol, Khelma, Rongmei, Karbi, Jaintiya—use Haflong Hindi to communicate with each other.

When a Dimasa tribal says, “Tumko mairong leke aaya”, one must understand that he means “I have brought some rice for you,” he explains. “Sometimes it is difficult to understand,” points out Anil Kumar Barua, Deputy Commissioner of the district. When one says, “Tum kutta hum khaya,” it means “Your dog has bitten me”. Or when someone says, “Hum agey girega,” it means “please drop me there.”

Brother Tongue

Ketan Tanna updates the underworld lexicon in the Times of India ('Bhais speak differently now', 9 Sep, 2007):

A crore, which the underworld famously called "khoka", is now "bada rupiya" while "peti" (one lakh) has become "chota rupiya". Encounter cop Sachin Vaze says that "supari" (contract killing), once the most feared word in the film and real estate circles, is today called "nariyal dena" as a tribute to the tradition of breaking a coconut to inaugurate a venture.

Needless to say, this is not a structured transformation. Old usages still linger but these new expressions are catching on. In the past, cops, especially the constable, were called "pandu" without affection. Later they were called "bidi", without affection, of course. But now they are called "badal". It's used as by gangsters as a warming to their men that the clouds have come and they should scoot.

AK-47 has become "Lambi" (referring to its length). Pistol is "Magazine" and bullets are "dane" (grains). A 6mm pistol is still called "chakri" and if one has to bring a 9mm variant then he is asked to bring "nine number ki chappal". An ordinary revolver is called file. Cash is still known as "kagaz" (paper) but now it is also called "patte" or "lottery" Gold which was called "pila" (yellow) is now also called "jaundice", according to the police, and silver is called "barf" (snow).

To eliminate a person, the underworld continues to use the "de de" (give it to him) or "baja de". But when a contract killing gets postponed, the term now used is "shaadi multavi ho gayi hai" (marriage has been postponed). When a gangster is on the run, he becomes "11 number ki bus" (11 refers to the two legs).

A police officer says that the foot soldiers of the underworld used to come from UP and Bihar and they had created the first lexicon. Now, with most gangs disbanded and the aura of the underworld decimated, even the literary talents of the mafia seem to have become diminished.

Slang Sighting: Bombay Docks

Slang term used on the Mumbai modelling circuit to describe someone with bad body odour.

"Mumbai lingo is a bit different. There’s a lot of Hindi slang and it’s mostly abusive, but used a lot in the modeling circuit. [A fairly common term here] is ‘bombay docks’, used when a girl has bad body odour." (Mumbai model Sahil Shroff quoted in The slang bang! by Reshma Arya, DNA, December 4, 2006)

English of India

An exhibition by Meena Kadri of the National Institute of Design, in collaboration with sign painter Yasin Chhipa. Catch it on Flickr. (For the ignorant, here's a basic definition of Roadside Romeo).

It's Hinglish, innit?

From BBC News:

Hinglish - a hybrid of English and south Asian languages, used both in Asia and the UK - now has its own dictionary.

A dictionary of the hybrid language has been gathered by Baljinder Mahal, a Derby-based teacher and published this week as The Queen's Hinglish.

Much of it comes from banter - the exchanges between the British white population and the Asians," she says.

"It's also sometimes a secret language, which is being used by lots of British Asians, but it's never been picked up on."

And in multi-cultural playgrounds, she now hears white pupils using Asian words, such as "kati", meaning "I'm not your friend any more". For the young are linguistic magpies, borrowing from any language, accent or dialect that seems fashionable.

Kati? That would be katti, I think, as in 'I'm katti with you' (cool title for Himesh Reshammiya's next doleful hit?)

Street Cricket

A glossary of street cricket terms from Wikipedia. This one's done the rounds as one of those annoying forwarded emails, but it's worth a read nevertheless. How else would you learn the meaning of this mysterious battle-cry?

Upeeeet (Up-it) Etymology partly English - When the batsman, usually the sothai hits the ball in the air, it is a common practice for all the fielders to scream Upeeet encouraging the fielder in the closest proximity to the ball to catch it.

Many of the terms listed are here originally from South India, so I'm not familiar with them. For example:

Gaaji Etymology English - Comes from 'Taking guard' - The Indian reference for an 'innings', usually for batting. It is a well known fact that captains of street cricket teams always prefer to bat first irrespective of conditions. A team batting is said to have had its 'gaaji' and a team which did not bat can get their 'gaaji' the next day

'Idea' Mani Etymology English. Mani refers to a common tamil name. - An intelligent player in the team who always comes up with ideas. Sometimes used in derogatory context to refer to someone who always comes up with ideas that won't materialize.

Street cricket always involves a great deal of improvisation. If you don't have the right equipment, or enough players, the rules of the game need to be adapted. That's how you land up with terms like these:

Automatic Wicketkeeper Etymology English - This indicates that a wicketkeeper is assumed to be standing behind the stumps. No person is placed in that position due to lack of fielders. If the batsman knicks the ball and it goes behind the stumps, he is out caught by the automatic wicketkeeper.

Double-side batsman Etymology English - When the total number of players is odd, one player is declared as Double-side batsman. Typically this person keeps the wicket and will not be allowed to bowl. Also known as inter-pinter.

And finally, do follow the links at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry, they'll lead you to some more glossaries.

Poi Bowling The hard-to-please Chennaiite’s description of the stuff dished out by most spin bowlers. Poi means a lie, and this term denotes lack of spin or fictitious spin. A variation is poi bowler. (V Ramnarayan, The romance of TN cricket, ChennaiOnline)

Baby Over A concept truly Indian. It was definitely invented by the strong guys of the team who realized that it was too expensive to allow a Chintu to bowl half-a-dozen balls which could prove fatal to the team. Hence, the Chintus bowled only 3 balls after which a Sameer or Jaspreet took over. No hard feelings. (Arvind Iyer, Iyer-archi's Blog)

Tapori Talk on Pak Radio

Mumbaiyya, the patois of Mumbai's streets is taking over the airwaves in Pakistan, reports Hasan Mansoor in Mid-Day ('Tapori India on Pak radio', Mid-Day, April 16, 2006).

Pakistani linguists have joined their Indian counterparts in lamenting the way Bambaiyya has defiled spoken language.

Panga lena (to invite trouble), phadda dalna (quarrel), jugar (doing something by any means), lash pash (fantastic), khancha (backdoor), lafra (quarrel), supari (commissioning a killer to kill someone), chief saab (the boss), and phrases like topi ghumana (to befool), meter ghoomna (become wild and violent), pinki hona (begrudged), hut jana (become violent and annoyed) — these are some of the words Pakistani youth are importing from India and popularising through radio and TV.

The article's worth a read, though I should point out that very few of the slang terms listed here are actual tapori talk. Chief saab is Pakistani slang, and so I suppose is pinki hona (no idea where that comes from, it sounds more P'njabi than Mumbaiyya).

Bitten by the Blurb

BollyWHAT? examines the fractured English of Indian DVD blurbs in a dissertation titled 'Bitten by the Blurb: The DVD Synopsis as Comedy Routine'. Very funny indeed, and I'm waiting for them to turn their attention to DVD subtitles. Meanwhile, here's the ingenious plot of a B-grade movie called Ek Aur Vishpot:

Hero of this film is honest muncipal commissioner, who is very strict about his rules & regulations. The villian belongs with the evil deeds. Their illegal construction are destroyed by our hero with the help of law & order. The villians plan in such a way our hero taken into the court. Court declares that our hero is pagal [mad] and taken to mental asylum.

In the mental asylum, he observed three characters (Anjan Srivastava, Kiran Kumar, Anees Khan) and escaped from the asylum. By mistake Asrani (Mad Doctor) joined in the mission, our hero uses all the four mads like weapon and all the mad characters kill one after another. If pagal kill a person, no punishment.

Finally hero again taken to court. Hero argued in the court:

1. If I am murderer, I could not be Pagal

2. But the same court given the judgement that I am a pagal

3. If I am a pagal I am not a murderer.

Judgement still awaited.

Complexion Coffee

I've heard of metre coffee, but what exactly is 'complexion coffee'? I came across this term in an Outlook review:

Coffee, a naturalised white man's drink, was introduced by the Portuguese, who also introduced the original version of the rasogolla. The natives, as the imperial mind put it, took to it with alacrity, abandoning their rice gruel for this bittersweet affair. Coffee was called complexion coffee in the family. It was something that the Brahmin mind needed with that other meticulous creation, The Hindu.

The book under review is In those days there was no coffee: Writings in Cultural History by A.R. Venkatachalapathy. It sounds interesting, and I'll surely read it one of these days, soon as I find a copy. But till then, any guesses?

The Below Statement

'The use of below in Indian English is well worth a study', writes K S Yadurajan in the Deccan Herald.

Several railway officers have assured me that a standard opening in railway official correspondence is: ‘Dear Sir, with reference to your above see my below’.

Below can be used as a adverb: go below the deck; we saw the blue waters spread below us. But in IE we see the use of below as an attributive modifier of a noun — the below statement.

More here.

Pirate Talk

Mid-Day ('Takla Hatela ya Lamba Khamba?', Mid-day, May 20, 2006) reports that the Mumbai underworld has coined new slang names for Bollywood actors and actresses. This list was extracted from a conversation between video pirates in Karachi and Mumbai, recorded by an anti-piracy cell.

The men

- Chyawanprash: Amitabh Bachchan (after the brand he endorses)
- Takla Hatela: Salman Khan (recently went bald)
- Jhakaas Mamu: Anil Kapoor
- Chikna Kaana: Saif Ali Khan
- Junior Daadhi: Abhishek Bachchan (thanks to his ever-present stubble)
- Booddha Hakla: Shah Rukh Khan
- Kavla hakla: Shahid Kapur (the aspiring SRK)
- Satkela AK-47 or Munnabhai: Sunjay Dutt
- Kala Ghoda: Ajay Devgan
- Charsi Punter: Fardeen Khan
- Chumma Jumma: Emraan Hashmi

The women

- Kajrawali: Aishwarya Rai
- Chhipkali: Urmila Matondkar
- Item bomb: Mallika Sherawat
- Boodhi Ghodi Lal Lagam: Rekha
- Carrom Board: Priyanka Chopra
- MMS item: Kareena Kapoor
- Shaani Batli: Rani Mukerji
- Lamba Khamba: Shilpa Shetty
- Khallaas Baby: Isha Koppikar
- Mota rola: Manisha Koirala

Been There. Done the Needful.

Got the T-shirt.

Your aunty is showing

First it was low-slung chaddi-revealing jeans. Now there's another mention of unmentionables in the current issue of Time Out Mumbai:

Cha-bra

A compound noun formed by joining the syllables cha and bra. Rhymes with sir. Shorthand for chaddi-bra, it's a Marathi synonym for lingerie.

Usage: Chee. All you see on page 3 is skinny models going to parties wearing only cha-bra.

Who writes this stuff anyway? Some Maharashtrian tai with an underwear fetish?

Sri Lankan English

The September 2005 issue of the OED Newsletter contains an article by Richard Boyle, one of the OED's consultants, which looks at the history of Sri Lankan English. A useful overview of the subject from the author of Knox's Words, a study of words of Sri Lankan origin recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Slang sighting: Dedhfutia

Dedfutia was the name of Sanjay Narvekar's character in Vaastav, the Mahesh Manjrekar film about Mumbai's underworld. The word is Marathi slang for a midget ('one-and-a-half-footer' is the literal translation) and is currently Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray's favoured epithet for State Revenue Minister Narayan Rane.

While addressing Sainiks from Rane's Sindhudurg district, Thackeray used what he proudly calls, Thackeri (street-language that is generally below the belt) and called Rane a variety of names. These included: bhadwa (pimp), dedhfutya (referring to his short stature), vasoolmantri (extortion minister), phurse (poisonous snake) and a mad dog. (Mid-Day, September 3, 2005)

Slang Sighting: Thumbs Up

Illiterate, uneducated. A reference to the Hindi idiom 'angootha chhaap', which describes illiterate individuals who place thumb impressions on documents in lieu of signatures.

"Most of these people including me are 'thumbs up' (uneducated)," said a 37-year-old Gujarati trader. (Hindustan Times, August 26, 2005)

Asian Voices in the UK

Voices is an ambitious BBC project that maps changes in regional accents and dialects in the UK. There's a wealth of material on the website, which includes over a thousand clips, links to many radio shows based on the BBC surveys, and a mini-site on the Asian Network, which deals with the languages of the Asian community. Here, you can contribute words to a Desi Dictionary or listen to Southall Punjabis talking about Pinglish, a cross between Punjabi and English. There's also a breakfast series called Out of English, which explores how Asian words are slipping into common English usage.

Elsewhere on the Voices site, there's an interesting article about the speech of the East End. I've written about Benglish earlier: the BBC's research shows that this dialect is replacing Cockney in parts of London.

Speaking in an interview for BBC Voices, Sue Fox, a socio-linguist at the Queen Mary College, University of London says that a new dialect is emerging to replace Cockney and that it's a mixture between English and Bangladeshi... Fox's findings are the result of her research into the way that Cockney is being influenced by the speech of Bangladeshi and other communities in Tower Hamlets. In the interview with the BBC Fox says: "This is very exciting for linguists - the language of London is changing. The majority of young people of school age are of Bangladeshi origin and this has had tremendous impact on the dialect spoken in the area.

"What I've actually found with the young people in Tower Hamlets is that they are using a variety of English which is not traditionally associated with cockney English - it's a variety that we might say is Bangladeshi-accented. And in turn what I've found is that some adolescents of white British origin are also using these features in their speech as well".

David Crystal sees this phenomenon repeating itself in cities across the UK, as foreign languages and regional dialects mix and influence each other:

For example, in Liverpool as well as the traditional Scouse accent you will hear distinct Caribbean-Scouse, African-Scouse as well as Indian-Scouse accents. In Cardiff I've heard a number of accent mixes that weren't previously heard before such as Cardiff-Arabic and Cardiff-Hindi. This pattern is repeating itself in many urban communities across the UK, people are especially keen to develop a strong sense of local identity.

Fascinating stuff. Unfortunately, there aren't any recordings of Cardiff Hindi or Indian Scouse on the site, though I did find this clip of Lancashire Urdu...